End-to-End Occluded Person Re-Identification With Artificial Occlusion Generation

In recent years, the task of person re-identification (Re-ID) has improved considerably with the advances in deep learning methodologies. However, occluded person Re-ID remains a challenging task, as parts of the body of the individual are frequently hidden by various objects, obstacles, or other people, making the identification process more difficult. To address these issues, we introduce a novel data augmentation strategy using artificial occlusions, consisting of random shapes and objects from a small image dataset that was created. We also propose an end-to-end methodology for occluded person Re-ID, which consists of three branches: a global branch, a feature dropping branch, and an occlusion detection branch. Experimental results show that the use of random shape occlusions is superior to random erasing using our architecture. Results on six datasets consisting of three tasks (holistic, partial and occluded person Re-ID) demonstrate that our method performs favourably against state-of-the-art methodologies.